Machen on Uniformity in Education

“Uniformity in education, it seems to me, is one of the worst calamities into which any people can fall. There are, it is true, some spheres in which uniformity is a good thing. It is a good thing, for example, in the making of Ford cars. … But what is good for a Ford car is not always good for a human being, for the simple reason that a Ford car is a machine while a human being is a person. Our modern pedagogic experts seem to deny the distinction, and that is one place where our quarrel with them comes in. When you are dealing with human beings, standardization is the last thing you ought to seek.”